How Taiwan’s local culture of design, food, and media reaches communities abroad

Tapioca pearls, the chewy balls that define Boba tea, are the top food import to the United States from Taiwan. That single trade statistic encodes a larger story about how a small island’s food culture became a global export, how Taiwanese design and media followed similar trajectories, and how those exports reach diaspora communities and broader populations in ways that formal diplomacy cannot.

Taiwan’s cultural presence in the world is not organized by a government program. It travels through immigrant entrepreneurs, franchise networks, streaming platforms, and the food courts of American cities, including Milwaukee.

Boba tea, also known as bubble tea in its Americanized form, has evolved into one of Taiwan’s most visible cultural exports. The beverage’s origin is disputed between two Taiwanese teahouses, Chun Shui Tang in Taichung and Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan. Both claim credit for adding tapioca pearls in the mid-1980s.

What is not disputed is that it emerged from Taiwan’s street food culture and became a global industry. Taiwanese sellers currently account for 69 percent of the U.S. tapioca market share by value, according to U.S. International Trade Commission data. The global bubble tea market was valued at over $2.9 billion as of 2023 and is projected to continue growing.

In Milwaukee, bubble tea shops operating in the city’s Asian commercial corridors represent the most visible and accessible point of contact between Taiwanese food culture and the general population. It is a daily commercial presence that requires no diplomatic relationship to sustain. The mechanism that carried bubble tea to Milwaukee is the same mechanism that carries all food culture across migration.

Taiwanese immigrants brought their culinary traditions abroad, establishing businesses that served both diaspora communities seeking familiar food and broader populations encountering it for the first time. That pattern of immigrant entrepreneurs building cultural transmission into commercial infrastructure brought Taiwanese restaurants, bakeries, and food products into American cities across multiple decades.

Cultural exports from Taiwan extend beyond food into design and media, although those exports travel through different channels and reach different audiences. Taiwan’s design industry has produced internationally recognized work across product design, graphic design, and digital interface design. The design culture reflects Taiwan’s specific industrial history. With decades of manufacturing for global markets, it created the technical precision and commercial awareness that Taiwanese designers brought to more creative fields.

The aesthetic sensibility that resulted sits at the intersection of Japanese influence, American commercialization, and distinctly Taiwanese creative priorities developed through that manufacturing experience. Taiwanese design work appears in international competitions, in the products of global companies that source design talent from Taiwan, and in the consumer objects of daily life whose origins are rarely visible to the people using them.

Taiwanese cinema also established its international reputation through directors whose work received recognition at the major film festivals beginning in the 1980s and continuing through subsequent decades. Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang built a body of work that defined Taiwan’s art film tradition and influenced filmmakers internationally. Contemporary Taiwanese media production reaches diaspora communities and broader audiences through streaming platforms that make content accessible across geographic boundaries.

Likewise, Taiwanese gaming companies contribute to the global gaming culture at a scale that individual titles make visible even when the national origin of their producers does not. The media exports are less visible in daily American life than food culture. A bubble tea shop is immediately identifiable in a way that a streaming series or a video game’s country of origin is not. But they reach diaspora communities through targeted distribution and community networks that maintain cultural continuity across distance.

The Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language on West Wisconsin Avenue is part of the same cultural transmission network that bubble tea shops and Taiwanese restaurants participate in, operating through a different mechanism but toward the same end. The school teaches Mandarin to Milwaukee children from kindergarten through eighth grade, maintains the first Mandarin language program in Milwaukee Public Schools, and now houses the International Newcomer Center for recently arrived refugee students learning English alongside academic content.

When Taipei Economic and Cultural Office officials traveled from Chicago to Milwaukee in 2010 to meet with the school’s principal about expanding educational cooperation, the visit validated that Taiwan’s cultural presence in Milwaukee is not a recent development. Nor was it confined to a single channel. It has been building through various institutions and multiple mechanisms for longer than most Milwaukee residents are aware.

That presence extends beyond any single institution or commercial category. The broader pattern that connects bubble tea shops, Taiwanese restaurants, the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language, and institutional relationships across Wisconsin is a form of cultural transmission that operates independently of diplomatic recognition. Taiwan does not have a formal embassy in the United States.

It maintains unofficial relations through the American Institute in Taiwan and through cultural organizations. The cultural dimension of the Taiwan connection is the one most present in daily life and least dependent on the geopolitical circumstances.

A Milwaukee resident who has never thought about the Taiwan Strait, who has no connection to the ethnic Chinese or Taiwanese American community, and who could not locate Taiwan on a map without assistance, may nonetheless have a direct and repeated relationship to Taiwanese cultural production through the bubble tea shop they visit, the films available on streaming platforms, or the consumer products whose design traces back to Taiwan’s industrial and creative culture.

That relationship does not require awareness to be real. It is present in places like Milwaukee regardless of whether the people participating in it know its origin.